A fuzzy ranking of negotiation packages for the INSPIRE negotiation support system

Abstract

Abstract Preferential information may be visualized in many different ways, and this constitutes an important issue in the principal-agent decision-making context, e.g., in representative negotiations. In the INSPIRE negotiation support system, the principal’s preferences are visualized by circles with different radii. Agents evaluate the principal’s preferences in such a manner that they digitize these preferences using numbers directly proportional to the size of the circles, drawn by the principal. The manner, in which an agent understands the concept of the circle size is unknown. The main goal of this paper is to propose such an image of principal’s preferences, which is independent of an individual agent’s evaluation. Individual negotiators may differ in their understanding of this concept. This means that the notion of “circle size” is a linguistic variable that may be described by a fuzzy set. The empirical studies referred to show that the size of the circle is a value between the radius and the area of this circle. In this paper, the principal’s preferences are defined as a fuzzy preorder between fuzzy “circle sizes”. We distinguish here two kinds of the INSPIRE method. All considerations are illustrated by means of a short case study based on INSPIRE data.